This weekend was all about eating cake! Well, and DIY. Mostly DIY actually, but there was some cake. We’d been invited to Chris’s cousin’s 21st; an afternoon tea at a fancy hotel. In order to get a good day’s work in before we clocked off for the party, we decided to sleep over at the house for the first time, giving us a Friday evening of work and an early start on the Saturday. In order to give us more focused work-time we dropped Idris off at Chris’s aunt’s for the night, meaning we didn’t have to stop to walk him.

It wasn’t 5* accommodation for the night, but the house was surprisingly warm at least. It would have been nice to sleepover more often during the renovations, but the dust, and lack of electrics, would have made it tricky early on.

A few nights before we spent an evening getting more of the plasterboard on around the kitchen window, including a very tricky corner.

Chris focused on the plumbing for the kitchen sink. Another fiddly but essential job.

Back at the house on the Friday night, I spent my time building more of the frame for the shower wall.

Chris added a recycled piece of wood to the wall in the old doorway, to build up the glass bricks above.

Finishing the last few bits of essential plasterboard around the kitchen windows, we were able to put the kitchen units in place, and Chris spent some time leveling them and connecting them together.

This meant we could add an old worktop, as a temporary surface for the sink to be mounted on. This is to fulfill one of the requirements to get out mortgage moved over; having a kitchen sink plumbed in.

The whole set up looks surprisingly nice, even despite the fact we won’t be keeping this worktop.

Upstairs I was continuing with the shower. When buying our secondhand glass bricks, we’d only been able to find them in a much larger quantity than we wanted. Though we’ll sell on the spares, we decided it would be nice to build some in to the shower wall, to let in some light. I therefore built another shelf across at the top of the shower, at the right height to allow two rows of bricks to be built above. Chris also decided we should build a little recess into the wall, for us to stick shampoo and soap into.

Having previously rebuilt part of the wall in the utility room I spent an annoyingly long time plastering it.

With the back wall cupboards in place we then added the cupboards for the island, and placed the remainder in the utility in order to make things looks a little neater.

Our final job was to tidy the house and take another car-full of rubbish to the recycling center. With our mortgage meeting set for Wednesday, and, with some luck, the valuation shortly after, hopefully we’ve done enough to pass the mark this time. At least it’ll be tidy if nothing else.